Google kills free version of Google Apps for businesses

All new business customers must pay $50 per user per year.

The free version of Google Apps for businesses that was offered to organizations with up to 10 employees is being killed off. The free tier was long touted as an advantage of Google's online office suite over Microsoft's productivity products, but in an announcement yesterday Google said the service wasn't useful to enough people to justify its existence.

"When we launched the premium business version [of Google Apps] we kept our free, basic version as well," Director of Product Management Clay Bavor wrote. "Both businesses and individuals signed up for this version, but time has shown that in practice, the experience isn't quite right for either group. Businesses quickly outgrow the basic version and want things like 24/7 customer support and larger inboxes. Similarly, consumers often have to wait to get new features while we make them business-ready."

The upshot is businesses signing up for new Google Apps accounts will have just one option, which starts at $50 per user per year (or $5 per user per month). Google Apps includes Google's key productivity services including Gmail, Calendar, Drive, and Docs, along with business-focused features like 24/7 customer support, a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee, and an IT administration console. There is also a data archiving service for businesses willing to pay a bit extra.

Free access to Google Apps is still available in certain cases. Google Apps for Education is still free, and business customers who are already using the free version of Google Apps will be grandfathered in. Customers that created Google Apps for Business accounts prior to December 6 will be allowed to downgrade to the free tier until January 9, 2013. And of course, individuals can still sign up for free Google accounts to get access to Gmail, Google Drive, Docs, etc. The competition, Microsoft's Office 365, ranges from $4 to $20 per user per month for standard accounts.

Until last year, Google Apps was actually free to businesses with up to 50 employees. Cutting that down to 10, and now eliminating the free tier for new signups altogether, shows Google perhaps moving toward a more professional model, as long as the extra revenue is poured into bolstering support. Google Apps support is often lackluster, as we reported last year based on interviews with customers.

"We're not serving them well," Google VP Sundar Pichai told the Wall Street Journal this week in reference to customers on the free tier. Eliminating the free tier for new business customers will disappoint some, but if coupled with better service for all customers it might ultimately be worth the sacrifice.

Sounds like a solid business move to me. The majority of the customers like to pay for the 24/7 support and it is always unwise to try and manage two fronts. Better to eliminate the smaller front and focus more of your efforts and money on the larger group of paying users.

Google Apps for Education is still free, and business customers who are already using the free version of Google Apps will be grandfathered in. Customers that created Google Apps for Business accounts prior to December 6 will be allowed to downgrade to the free tier until January 9, 2013.

I'm assuming there is a key bit of information missing from the second sentence in that customers paying for service since before Dec. 6th, 2012 have the option to drop down to the free service until January 9th, 2013. What makes the original quote confusing (to me anyway) is that the free accounts are Google Apps for Business accounts as well.

Sounds like a solid business move to me. The majority of the customers like to pay for the 24/7 support and it is always unwise to try and manage two fronts. Better to eliminate the smaller front and focus more of your efforts and money on the larger group of paying users.

I agree. Business is business, and apparently Google just could not justify offering free accounts.

I have one of the grandfathered accounts. If Google decides to do away with even the free grandfathered accounts, I would pay the $50 a year in a heartbeat. The value I get from using Google Apps with my own custom domain is more than worth it.

Sounds like a solid business move to me. The majority of the customers like to pay for the 24/7 support and it is always unwise to try and manage two fronts. Better to eliminate the smaller front and focus more of your efforts and money on the larger group of paying users.

What makes you think the majority of the accounts are paid accounts? I'd be willing to bet the majority are free accounts.

This is going to hit a lot of bloggers. They don't need the 24x7 business support. What they needed was a mail service that uses their own domain, not a gmail.com address. A free email service with one or two addresses per domain is very useful.

For bloggers who support multiple sites, paying $50 annually per email address gets rather expensive.

I have one of the grandfathered accounts. If Google decides to do away with even the free grandfathered accounts, I would pay the $50 a year in a heartbeat. The value I get from using Google Apps with my own custom domain is more than worth it.

Same here. Still, I think there's a lot of room for a tier in between free and business priced.

Quote:

What makes you think the majority of the accounts are paid accounts? I'd be willing to bet the majority are free accounts.

This, although I assume most of those are enthusiast personal accounts so the load and upkeep on them will be negligible compared to a real business account.

This is going to hit a lot of bloggers. They don't need the 24x7 business support. What they needed was a mail service that uses their own domain, not a gmail.com address. A free email service with one or two addresses per domain is very useful.

For bloggers who support multiple sites, paying $50 annually per email address gets rather expensive.

If they currently have those accounts they are fine. There is no reason a single account cannot be used to maintain multiple websites. Who wants to check multiple emails accounts anyways?

I run Google Apps for Business on 4 domains. They're all used for personal testing and are things like my name or surname. One of them's for a business I started that didn't go anywhere. Personally I'd have to pay for at least 7 email accounts, which for me would be $35/month or $420/year. That's a LOT of money for the ability to run email on a few domains. I'd willingly pay $5/month for one of those addresses as it's important to me and I use for business, but when you add it all up, it's way out of line for a personal user.

That's not even including my other family members who use the services. They'd all be paying too. There needs to be a tier closer to $1/month with advertising, or $2/month without. I'm glad I have the domains set up that I have, but I'll be bummed out when I have to bring something else online.

My experience with Google has been that it is damn near impossible to get any kind of support for their products - even the bug reporting is a lesson in frustration. Granted, I am not using any of the paid services but given the utter lack of support with their other offerings, it makes me think twice about using them for paid service.

Just as an example, here was my attempt at trying to report a bug in one of Google's own Chrome extensions:

Thing is, while I do not begrudge Google for asking us to pay for accounts, $50/year per user is too steep for businesses who are penny-pinching and only want email addresses on the domain without the extra features (or support) of drive and other apps (although Calendar is pretty handy).

As is, if they have to pay so much, my clients will not see why it is better to run email off of Google's servers than it is to run off of most hosting services, and explaining it to them is not going to be easy.

This is going to hit a lot of bloggers. They don't need the 24x7 business support. What they needed was a mail service that uses their own domain, not a gmail.com address. A free email service with one or two addresses per domain is very useful.

For bloggers who support multiple sites, paying $50 annually per email address gets rather expensive.

If they currently have those accounts they are fine. There is no reason a single account cannot be used to maintain multiple websites. Who wants to check multiple emails accounts anyways?

It's good that existing accounts aren't affected, but it kills the opportunity for new domains.

Yes, there are reasons why you don't want a single account to maintain multiple Web sites. Part of it is branding, particularly if those web sites have different, unrelated businesses. When you get a reply from a site, you likely expect the email to come from the same domain. It's a matter of trust. Any fool can sign up for a GMail account and claim to be from Ars Technica or IBM. Do you believe them?

I wouldn't. That's why I maintain email addresses for each of my domains.

To sign up for Google Apps, you actually end up signing up for Google Apps for Business first (with 30 days free). Then you can downgrade to the free Google Apps if you don't want to pay for the fee. This seems to be the service that Google is eliminating.

Shame - the ability to basically have a Google account, but using a custom domain, was really, really handy. Was planning to move my parents domain yesterday but put it on the "to do tomorrow" pile

Who said using custom domains with Google was affected? There is still Google Apps (sans business) and it can use custom domains.

My understanding was that "Google Apps (sans business)" was the free version of Google Apps. As in the same the one that Google have just now killed and are pushing people to go to the paid version.

Given that those people who used the free version of Apps didn't get 25MB, didn't get 24/7 support and did get adverts (and were totally happy with that fact, otherwise they wouldn't have joined), then you're basically paying $50 per person per year for three things you could live without just to get the one thing you really wanted (use of your own domain).

I work with a lot of small start ups who rely on Google Apps and the current pricing structure simply puts it out of their reach. I know that $50 per user per year may seem inconsequential, but small startups often work on shoestring budgets and they won't be able to justify the cost.

It's understandable that Google wants to eliminate a free tier. But why not replace it with something more affordable? A flat rate $50 fee for the first 5 users would be perfect for these types of organizations.

Okay, I thought there was a free version for "Google Apps for business". From the opening of this article.

Quote:

The free version of Google Apps for businesses that was offered to organizations with up to 10 employees is being killed off. The free tier was long touted as an advantage of Google's online office suite over Microsoft's productivity products, but in an announcement yesterday Google said the service wasn't useful to enough people to justify its existence.

There never was a free version for business. That should be corrected.

I have one of the grandfathered accounts. If Google decides to do away with even the free grandfathered accounts, I would pay the $50 a year in a heartbeat. The value I get from using Google Apps with my own custom domain is more than worth it.

Same here. Still, I think there's a lot of room for a tier in between free and business priced.

Well, it's pretty clear there's demand for such a tier, but presumably Google has run the numbers and determined that they can't profitably supply it.

Quote:

Quote:

What makes you think the majority of the accounts are paid accounts? I'd be willing to bet the majority are free accounts.

This, although I assume most of those are enthusiast personal accounts so the load and upkeep on them will be negligible compared to a real business account.

Definitely true that the majority are free. But "negligible" is a slippery word when you're talking about large numbers. If Google loses $0.50/year on each one but has 50,000,000 of them... the loss on each one is negligible, but the net effect is worth fixing.

There's an argument that Google could fix the *loss* rather than withdrawing the service, but in fact this decision likely reflects a widening loss because of declining PPC ad revenue. Google's struggling with that across the board, and if Google Apps is losing money at an accelerating rate, pulling the plug is a reasonable decision.

Microsoft does has a free alternative with domains.live.com and using outlook.com for email and calendar.

Edit: I just wanted to mention the free alternative as the article suggests the subscription Office 365 is the only competition from Microsoft. For the record, I use Google Apps for my family's domain. I tested Outlook.com a couple months ago, but it wasn't worth the hassle to change.

My experience with Google has been that it is damn near impossible to get any kind of support for their products - even the bug reporting is a lesson in frustration. Granted, I am not using any of the paid services but given the utter lack of support with their other offerings, it makes me think twice about using them for paid service.

Bingo. Their 'support' is worse than non-existent. Pay money for a service when my experience beforehand has been shockingly poor? No fucking way.

If they kept the option to open a Google account but with custom DNS settings, I'm not sure how that would be any more or less profitable than an ordinary Google account (ie a gmail.com account, which you can freely open as many of as you like).

I wonder who they consulted when they concluded that the "service wasn't useful to enough people to justify its existence"?

Bad move Google.

This is really too bad. I use Google as cheap domain hosting, and I really like their Wiki service, Google Sites. With Sites, I can throw up a simplistic web page for $10 a year. There's literally no simpler way to get a web presence than that.

But I don't own a business; my domains are really just vanity domains for a couple of projects that I started but never really made any progress on. (The story of my life.)

I can't imagine a business using Google Docs as their primary word processor or spreadsheet, and a lot of people don't even know about Group or Sites... so it comes down to using things like gmail, $50 a year per user seems steep for gmail accounts.

Why not a tier that gives users a free, ad supported services on a custom domain name?

It is surprising that they haven't merged docs and drive with business like they did for the rest of the world.

They get a 99% uptime? Lucky! The rest of us are lucky to get 70% uptime.

I am part of a small company that uses Google apps and we use the free tier. Support is not a must. And then there are the people who just wanted to use gmail for their own domain, I doubt they have any need for support either.

Also, I feel bad for the place you work that only manages 70% uptime. That's almost 8 hours a day of downtime. Time to clean house in the IT department, or find a better managed service provider.